The FAA Certified Boeing’s 737 MAX 10 on Oct. 20, Nine Years After Launch. Airlines Had Already Ordered 1,555

The biggest 737 ever built is finally legal to deliver. The airlines that bought it have been waiting since 2017, and most of them will not fly one until 2027.

The Federal Aviation Administration certified the Boeing 737 MAX 10 on Oct. 20, 2026. Boeing launched the jet at the Paris Air Show on June 19, 2017, so the approval came nine years and four months later.

By certification day, more than 30 customers had ordered 1,555 of them, Boeing says. That is more than 30 percent of every 737 MAX still waiting to be built, for an airplane that had not yet carried a single passenger.

Why a 66-inch stretch took nine years to approve

On paper the MAX 10 is a modest change. Boeing’s 2017 launch release describes a fuselage 66 inches longer than the MAX 9, a levered main landing gear to keep the tail off the runway, and room for up to 230 passengers.

The jet was launched with more than 240 orders and commitments from more than 10 customers. Then the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people, grounded the whole family and changed how the FAA certifies airliners.

Both crashes began with a faulty angle-of-attack reading that triggered software pushing the nose down. The 737 MAX crisis remade aircraft certification, and Congress wrote the result into the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act of 2020.

That law gave manufacturers until the end of 2022 to bring the crew alerting systems of new aircraft up to modern standards. The MAX 10 was not certified by then, and every MAX still uses a version of the alerting system from the first 737s of the 1960s.

In December 2022, Congress passed an amendment letting the FAA certify the MAX 7 and MAX 10 without the new alerting system. The price was a retrofit: within three years, every MAX would need two safety upgrades, including a switch to silence persistent cockpit alarms.

The first flight had come on June 18, 2021, from Renton Field to Boeing Field in Seattle. At the time, Boeing was still aiming for entry into service in 2023.

The MAX 10 order book, by the numbers

The measure here is firm orders, not deliveries and not jets in service. As of Oct. 20, 2026, the MAX 10 has zero of the last two.

Milestone	Date	MAX 10 orders
Launch at the Paris Air Show	June 19, 2017	240+ orders and commitments
First airplane unveiled at Renton	Nov. 22, 2019	531
First flight	June 18, 2021	n/a
Boeing’s first sub-type breakdown	July 2023	810 (19% of MAX orders)
FAA certification	Oct. 20, 2026	1,555

Orders nearly doubled between July 2023 and certification, while the jet sat in limbo. Ryanair ordered 150 in May 2023 after walking away from talks in 2021 over price.

Boeing counts 7,350 orders for the whole 737 MAX family and nearly 2,500 deliveries through September 2026. Our look at the 737 MAX backlog and its record delivery pace found 4,902 unfilled 737 orders on Sept. 30, so the MAX 10 is about one in three of them.

In the United States, Alaska, American, Delta and United each have 100 or more on order, according to One Mile at a Time. Abroad, Ryanair, WestJet, Pegasus Airlines and Akasa Air hold large orders too.

Boeing’s certification program ran to nearly 1,000 test flights, more than 2,000 flight hours and 1,000 hours of ground testing. The MAX 10 is the first airliner certified to the full extent of the 2020 law, Boeing says.

Why the approval reaches every 737 MAX already flying

The certificate does more than clear one variant. It starts the clock Congress set in 2022, and that clock covers the MAX 8 and MAX 9 jets passengers board every day.

Under the FAA’s implementation plan, any newly certificated 737 must carry enhanced angle-of-attack and crew-alerting protections from October 2027. Existing 737 MAX aircraft must be updated by October 2029, AVweb reports.

The required changes include a system to handle erroneous angle-of-attack data and a way for pilots to silence stall and overspeed warnings. Those are the exact failure modes behind the two crashes, and Boeing says the enhanced angle-of-attack system will become standard across the MAX family.

For airlines, the payoff is seats. Boeing quotes 185 to 210 passengers in two classes and the lowest per-seat costs of any single-aisle jet in service, though the trade is range: up to 3,100 nautical miles, against 3,800 for the MAX 7.

The delay had a cost of its own. In January 2024, United CEO Scott Kirby said the airline was building fleet plans without the MAX 10, and United spent years flying its oldest jets longer than planned.

When the first MAX 10 actually carries passengers

Boeing says deliveries begin “in the coming months.” Every airline schedule we found points to 2027 for passenger service.

Alaska is aiming to put its first MAX 10 into service in April or May 2027, after it certifies its own head-up display setup. It is also planning lie-flat Aurora Suites on the MAX 10 from 2028.

Ryanair expects its first 15 in spring 2027, Michael O’Leary told reporters on Sept. 29. United said on its second-quarter call that it expects its first MAX 10 in mid- to late 2027, with up to 20 arriving that year.

Boeing finished MAX 10 certification flight testing in July, and the FAA certified the smaller MAX 7 in August. A late navigation-software glitch briefly held up the MAX 10, until the FAA ruled it was not a safety concern.

Boeing will build the jet in Renton and on its newest 737 line in Everett, a line big enough to be filled with MAX 10s nose to tail. With 1,555 on order, it will need the room.